We were struck last Saturday by how George Clooney’s stage production of Good Night, and Good Luck remains relevant and vital today.
CNN did a live broadcast of the play, which documents the North Carolina-born CBS journalist Edward R. Murrow’s reporting of Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy’s communist witch hunt through the House Un-American Activities Committee Hearings in the 1950s.
We have seen the movie version of this production several times, as it is among our top three journalism films, along with Spotlight, which highlights the Boston Globe’s reporting on how the Catholic Church responded to and handled child sexual abuse cases, and, of course, All the President’s Men, which documents Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward’s reporting of the Watergate scandal and how it brought down the Nixon administration.
More importantly, the film and stage production offer snippets from his famous October 15, 1958, Wires and Lights in a Box speech, where the renowned journalist tells his audience at what is now the Radio Television Digital News Association Convention what television could be versus what it was becoming even then.
“Our history will be what we make it,” Murrow said. “And if there are any historians about fifty or a hundred years from now, and there should be preserved the kinescopes for one week of all three networks, they will there find recorded in black and white, or perhaps in color, evidence of decadence, escapism and insulation from the realities of the world in which we live.”
He continued, “I invite your attention to the television schedules of all networks between the hours of 8 and 11 p.m., Eastern Time. Here you will find only fleeting and spasmodic reference to the fact that this nation is in mortal danger.”
How prophetic was this speech, and how ironic that if you changed television to internet, you would come up with the same comparisons.
This is but one reason why Good Night, and Good Luck remains relevant.
The other is a hard truth if you look at what is scheduled to occur Saturday — a parade which in our opinion is of Red Square proportions and a birthday celebration for a president who is placating his own self-inflated ego and who, again in our opinion, cares not one iota for the document our founding fathers crafted with care and concern to form a more perfect union — The Constitution of the United States.
Substitute McCarthy’s name with that of the current president, and if you look objectively — not with partisan eyes — you can see why Clooney’s film and stage productions of this important work remain vital in the face of immigrant witch hunts, taking countries by force, and his callous attitude toward due process and the rule of law.
We respect our military. Our father served honorably in some of the most troubled conflicts of World War II — Normandy and the Ardennes Forest, to name a few.
What we don’t respect is using our military as a prop to fuel a bloated ego, policies that are going to make our national debt skyrocket, and the nationalistic mistreatment of immigrants who are for the most part looking for a better way of life, yet are accused of being rapists, common criminals, and the ridiculous claim that many of them are eating pets.
As the grandson of an Albanian immigrant who may or may not have entered this country legally, we find it insulting, as Spiro Musha, who learned to read and write English, carved out a living, going from place to place across this country to find work and more than adequately provided for his growing brood of children.
These are the reasons Good Night, and Good Luck remains relevant in the face of pardoning homegrown terrorists who defiled our nation’s Capitol building in 2021, people who supported a lie that an election had been stolen when there was never any proof of that, only one person’s false allegations that it was so.
The difference between the movie and the stage production was that near the end of the play, a video montage was played that documents the rise and fall of television, important events in our nation’s history that show the birth of many partisan fake news outlets, and ends with the Capitol siege.
If Murrow were alive today, surely he would be at the top of the president’s enemies of the state list, just as he was essentially labeled during the McCarthy witch hunts.
“I began by saying that our history will be what we make it,” Murrow said in his speech. “If we go on as we are, then history will take its revenge, and retribution will not limp in catching up with us.”
In the next-to-last paragraph, he says of television, “This instrument can teach, it can illuminate; yes, and even can inspire. But it can do so only to the extent that humans are determined to use it to those ends. Otherwise, it's nothing but wires and lights in a box. There is a great and perhaps decisive battle to be fought against ignorance, intolerance and indifference. This weapon of television could be useful.”
Good night, and good luck — Editor